Dangerous Ages eBook

“Only a little longer,” said Nan, and
laid her hand lightly and coolly on the hot wet forehead.

The little winner... damn her....

The edge of a smile, half-ironic, wholly bitter, twisted
at Nan’s lips.

10

Voices and steps. Barry and a doctor, Barry and
a stretcher, Barry and all kinds of help. Barry’s
anxious eyes and smile. “Well? How’s
she been?”

He was on his knees beside her.

“Here’s the doctor, darling.... I’m
sorry I’ve been so long.”

CHAPTER X

PRINCIPLES

1

Through the late September and October days Gerda
would lie on a wicker couch in the conservatory at
Windover, her sprained leg up, her broken wrist on
a splint, her mending head on a soft pillow, and eat
pears. Grapes too, apples, figs, chocolates of
course—­but particularly pears. She
also wrote verse, and letters to Barry, and drew in
pen and ink, and read Sir Leo Chiozza Money’s
“Triumph of Nationalisation” and Mrs.
Snowden on Bolshevik Russia, and “Lady Adela,”
and “Coterie,” and listened while Neville
read Mr. W.H. Mallock’s “Memoirs”
and Disraeli’s “Life.” Her
grandmother (Rodney’s mother) sent her “The
Diary of Opal Whiteley,” but so terrible did
she find it that it caused a relapse, and Neville
had to remove it. She occasionally struggled in
vain with a modern novel, which she usually renounced
in perplexity after three chapters or so. Her
taste did not lie in this direction.

“I can’t understand what they’re
all about,” she said to Neville. “Poetry
means something. It’s about something
real, something that really is so. So are books
like this—­” she indicated “The
Triumph of Nationalisation.” “But
most novels are so queer. They’re about
people, but not people as they are. They’re
not interesting.”

“Not as a rule, certainly. Occasionally
one gets an idea out of one of them, or a laugh, or
a thrill. Now and then they express life, or
reality, or beauty, in some terms or other—­but
not as a rule.”

Gerda was different from Kay, who devoured thrillers,
shockers, and ingenious crime and mystery stories
with avidity. She did not believe that life was
really much like that, and Kay’s assertion that
if it weren’t it ought to be, she rightly regarded
as pragmatical. Neither did she share Kay’s
more fundamental taste for the Elizabethans, Carolines
and Augustans. She and Kay met (as regards literature)
only on economics, politics, and modern verse.
Gerda’s mind was artistic rather than literary,
and she felt no wide or acute interest in human beings,
their actions, passions, foibles, and desires.

So, surrounded by books from the Times library, and
by nearly all the weekly and monthly reviews (the
Bendishes, like many others, felt, with whatever regret,
that they had to see all of these), Gerda for the most
part, when alone, lay and dreamed dreams and ate pears.